The Yellowstone Art Museum: A Jail Becomes a Gallery

In the fall of nineteen sixty-four, Billings opened an art center in the former Yellowstone County Jail. The building had been constructed in eighteen eighty-four, one of the first acts of the newly organized county government. By the mid-twentieth century, the jail had outlived its original purpose, and local artists and advocates saw an opportunity. The Yellowstone Art Center, later renamed the Yellowstone Art Museum, moved in, and the cells became galleries.

The choice of focus was deliberately unconventional for its time. When established regional museums were emphasizing western genre painting and frontier nostalgia, the founders of this institution chose contemporary art from the northern Rockies region. They wanted to show what living artists were doing, not just what the frontier had looked like.

Over the decades the collection grew significantly. The museum now holds more than seven thousand three hundred works and is the largest contemporary art museum in Montana. Among its most significant holdings is the largest public collection of works by Will James, the cowboy artist and author who won the nineteen twenty-seven Newbery Medal for Smoky the Cowhorse. James was, in his way, an invented westerner: born in Quebec as Joseph Dufault, he constructed the persona of a Montana cowboy with such thoroughness that the persona became the reality. His drawings and paintings, which depict horses, cattle, and the working cowboy life with genuine knowledge and feeling, are preserved here in depth.

The museum also holds a collection of New York Abstract Expressionist work donated by dealer Eleanor Ward Poindexter, paintings by Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and others. It is an unlikely pairing in an unlikely building, and it works.